RevOpsXL
A maker of specialized agricultural machinery in EMEA ran on HubSpot, and on paper the pipeline looked healthy. It wasn’t. Deals were being opened off conversations that were never real meetings, and the single number the team was measured on, how many meetings they booked, rewarded exactly that. We matched the call data against the CRM to see how much of the pipeline was real.
This is a long-cycle business. Technical buyers, machinery that costs real money, and a short list of accounts that matter more than all the rest put together. When the pipeline is that concentrated, the forecast is what everyone upstairs plans the year around.
We came in to audit the CRM. We cleaned it up, re-structured some of the objects so a record meant one thing instead of five, and read the open pipeline deal by deal. That is where the pattern turned up, the one that is about as old as the Greeks: everything gets committed just before quarter-end, and then, somehow, the lead disappears.
One salesperson was also covering the BDR role, booking the meetings and opening the deals that came out of them. A good share of those deals came out of conversations that were never really meetings. And none of the calls were logged in HubSpot, so at first there was nothing to hold the deals up against.
The recordings existed anyway. The team ran Fireflies, even where nobody was copying it into the CRM, so we pulled that data and matched it back to the meetings, deal by deal.
Nobody had written down what a good meeting was, so no conversation had a bar to clear. Leads got pushed into calls to make the count, whether or not there was a reason for the call to exist. The team was not being lazy. They were doing precisely what the metric asked of them.
Opportunities were attached to those leads to make it all look bigger. Nothing sat underneath them: no call recording, no notes worth the name, a close date and a value with no evidence for either. It read like a forecast. It was closer to a wish.
None of this was really about one person falling short. The salesperson doubling as a BDR knew the work, and it showed in the two accounts they already ran and kept growing. The trouble was the seat, not the person. Net-new prospecting is a different discipline, with a rhythm and a temperament that account work does not share, and it was not where their strengths were. Point a strong account manager at cold, high-volume hunting and grade them on meeting count, and you will get meetings and thin pipeline instead of the account growth they are actually good at.
It is tempting to make this about one person. But the longer we looked, the more it was about what the setup rewarded. Count only meetings and you get meetings, with or without anything behind them. That is a design problem, and design is fixable.
So the answer was not to fire anyone. It was to change what the system was asking for, starting upstream.
No strategy means no backbone, and no way to tell a real deal from a hopeful one. Before the CRM can help anyone, the team has to settle two things: what a qualified opportunity is, and what a meeting has to produce to count. Which accounts deserve real time falls out of that.
A deal earns its place once there is something real behind it: a logged conversation and an agreed next step. Wire the call data into the record so a meeting cannot happen off the books, and set the bar a deal has to clear before it counts as pipeline. Once that bar exists, the forecast is something you can plan against instead of argue about.
And put people where they are strong. The account manager should be on accounts, measured on how those accounts grow. Net-new is a different job. It needs its own person and its own number, and a dedicated BDR to do the hunting.
The engagement did not end with a re-org. It ended with something leadership had not had before: a clear read on how much of the pipeline was real, and a short list of what to change to keep it honest.